Brands are different today. The old model of a separate, distant, inauthentic and controllable...

Rethink

The consumer

Consumers have changed. Brands have changed. Today, people expect more from brands and companies. They are searching for brands that share their values, cares, and concerns. They look behind the logo, often voting with their pocketbooks to ensure that their personal values are reflected in their spending. They span age, income level, and geography, and there are many of them – from the 7% of the population who are socially responsible to the core, to the 70% who recycle and occasionally seek out organic foods. And the brands they purchase live on Main Street, too. From food and fashion, to petroleum and cars, more and more brands strive to build their financial bottom lines while also having a positive impact on society – it’s just good business.

egg is a one-of-a-kind brand communications firm that specializes in helping these brands build lasting, meaningful connections with today’s conscious consumer. We started in 2003 — years before the mainstreaming of “green,” and have been living and breathing the conscious consumer ever since. We are rigorous about research, and especially attuned to the qualitative elements beyond the statistics, the nuanced headspace that conscious consumers inhabit, and how to penetrate it.

Who is the 7-70 consumer?

7% of the population is socially responsible to the core. And 70% are socially responsible in some way, but to a lesser extent. In between, there’s a wide range of people who are motivated by aspects of social or environmental responsibility to different degrees. For example, some consumers buy organic because it’s good for the environment, while the majority buy strictly for personal health. Regardless of the specific motivation, these are people of all ages and income levels who are looking for brands that speak to their values of personal, social and environmental responsibility. They buy food in mainstream grocery stores, and also neighborhood co-ops. They live in Topeka, as well as SoHo. And they’re just as likely to be seen in church on Sunday as they are in yoga class. It’s a niche that’s become the mainstream. We call them the 7-70 consumer, and they are everywhere. We know them. We are them. And no one understands how to reach them better than we do. Reaching people at one end of the continuum is very different from reaching people at the other end, and we understand the varying emotional and rational mechanisms that reach consumers at any position on the continuum.

Marketing to the conscious consumer isn’t easy. They’ve got a higher level of cultural sophistication than average — this is at the heart of what it means to be “conscious”. They see through things. They question the status quo. And they don’t like feeling manipulated. Which is, of course, what marketers do. To complicate things further, we are often trying to help our clients expand their audiences beyond a tiny niche, and because our clients are creating cutting-edge products and services, attracting new consumers involves education and behavior change — not just screaming the loudest, coolest, or prettiest about a parity product. So in order to cut through the media-saturated mental landscape and hold people’s attention and interest, we need to be deeply attuned to human psychology in the context of cultural change. Otherwise, our clients’ marketing dollars are wasted, and their missions go unfulfilled. Check out “rethink process” for more on how we do this.

To learn more about our most recent research on the 7-70 consumer, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).